Souls of Black Folk: a Call for Ultimate Liberation
Published in 1903, Souls of Black Folk by .E.B. Du Bois remains to be one of the most important and a pioneering book on political, economic, social, and cultures lives of African-Americans in America. It is a collection of autobiographical and other essays by Du Bois that touch upon a variety of issues, including slavery, racism, liberation, history of African-Americans, and the questions of identity and consciousness. The main argument of Du Bois in this book is that African-Americans need to develop spiritually and through education to attain full political, economic, and social rights alongside hites in America. Du Bois predicted that it would be a long struggle and therefore argued at the beginning of his book that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of color line" (Du Bois vii). Throughout the book, Du Bois discusses several issues to…...

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Work Cited:

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co, 1903. Print.

Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Theme of Double-Consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

In his literary work, The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois discusses the history of the enslavement and struggle of black Americans in the American society for years. In this essay, Du Bois talks about the glorious history, and gradual decline of the black American race as they were put into bondage by the European colonizers in the early 17th to 18th centuries. The history of the glorious black American race is followed hereafter by a discussion of the enslavement of the race, wherein Africans were transported to America to serve as workers and servants to the European-descent inhabitants of the 'New World' (America). The author further extends his discussion and analysis by studying the long history of enslavement, the lives and experiences of black American slaves in…...

Souls of Black Folks
In the book The Souls of Black Folks, author .E.B. Dubois writes about the disparages in the treatments of southern blacks. Throughout the work Dubois discusses the various issues that require attention and the policies in the United States which require reformation in order to create equality in the races. African-Americans of the south deserved the right to vote, a decent and equal education, and above all to be treated equally in personal, legal, and in all governmental matters. In the first chapter, Dubois describes a metaphor which he carries throughout the rest of the text; that of the metaphor of the invisible veil. This veil, he claims, is the metaphorical divider between races, a visual analogue of the race barrier which also serves to symbolize the obstruction of laws and equality which is equated by the difference between appearances of black and white.

Although Dubois states…...

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Works Cited:

Dubois, William (1903). The Souls of Black Folks. Forgotten Books.

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The author characterizes the obsession with whiteness and the immorality that it inspires in the treatment of blacks as being (ironically) responsible for the "shriveling and dying" of white souls. He also describes how as a black person, he has an unfiltered view into the naked truth of the character of many white people. Since white people regard blacks as completely inconsequential, they routinely suspend their normal efforts to compose themselves as they wish others to see them. Because blacks are not worth the effort of manners, or courtesy, or conversation, white people actually reveal more about who (and what) they really are underneath the usual veil of social politeness or conventions in the presence of blacks.

The author goes on to explain how the preoccupation with white supremacy also succeeded in undermining the integrity of modern science in the effort to justify the differential treatment of the races in scientific…...

Randall Robinson's book The Debt (2000) about the condition of blacks in America, he states that the United States owes reparations to the descendents of slaves. In The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other, written two years later, he moves the emphasis of obligation to other blacks in America. He urgently requests that black leaders and those who have made their way up the socio-economic ladder to work toward improving the dismal situation in urban settings. His plea of help is to the so-called "gated blacks," or those African-Americans who have been able to move up into the middle class, but have either purposely or subconsciously forgotten about those blacks who have become prison laborers in the continuously growing American Gulag.
Robinson leads readers through the life of Peewee Kirkland, a black New Yorker whose tough upbringing led him to a life of crime and to prison twice. Peewee…...

Science cannot prove that love exists and yet most scientists have probably felt love at least once in their lives. Just because something cannot be proven using the scientific method does not mean that thing does not exist. The scientific method might never work to prove the existence of soul mates or reincarnation. Folk wisdom has alone carried the torch of belief in such mystical things. Soul mates is a concept that has been around for centuries and rings true on an emotional level.

Psychologists and especially counselors should surely consider learning about the concept of soul mates to help their clients. Clients frequently have relationship issues that can be solved through the type of self-awareness that searching for a soul mate entails. Exploring the possibility of a soul mate can help individuals learn more about their own spiritual selves, encouraging insight and self-awareness. Thus, searching for perfection in a relationship…...

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References

Plato (360 BCE). Symposium. Translated by Jowett, B. Retrieved Feb 7, 2010 from  http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html 

Quansah, E. (2004). How to Identify Your Soulmate. Victoria, BC: Traford.

"Victoria Beckham: David is My Soulmate." ShowbizSpy. Retrieved Feb 7, 2010 from  http://www.showbizspy.com/article/198887/victoria-beckham-david-is-my-soulmate.html 

Webster, R. (2001). Soul mates: Understanding Relationships Across Time. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn.

The Scriptures also speak of dreams and prophesies which come through God's servant, delivering words of God's will to the people Though the preacher may not want to preach these words, like Jonah, he or she is commissioned to do so or he or she is no preacher. The Holy Spirit also is the comforter (John 14:16) and through the words of a preacher, God's people find relief and comfort for their anguished souls. The Spirit is also described as bringing Truth to God's people (John 16:13-14) and speaks the truth on God's authority.
hen the listener he or shears the ord of God from the preacher's mouth, he or she is receiving a personal communication from God, but that is only if the preacher has become God's vessel and delivers the ord received through the Holy Spirit. Henry Heywood Mitchell asks us to understand the culture from which the…...

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Works Cited

Alexander, Geoff. "An Introduction to Black Preaching Styles." Black Preaching Styles. Website: http://www.afana.org/preaching.htm.1986-2008.

Davis, Gerald L. I Got the Word in Me and I Can Sing it, You Know. Philadelphia: U. Of Pennsylvania Press. 1985.

Day, David; Astley, Jeff and Francis, Leslie J., Eds. African-American Preaching: The Future of a Rich Tradition by Mitchell, Henry Heywood. A Reader on Preaching -- "Making Connections. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2005.

Mitchell, Henry H. Black Preaching. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1970.

Montgomery Bus Boycott
"We are sorry that the colored people blame us for any state or city ordinance which we didn't have passed ... we had nothing to do with the laws being passed, but we expect to abide by all laws, city or state ... " (Montgomery City Lines Superintendent J.H. Bagley, quoted on December 3, 1955, in the Montgomery Advertiser daily newspaper).

hat quote may be reminiscent of the classic excuse, "We were just doing our jobs," but so were the thousands of African-American folks who were determined to change the way they were treated in Alabama and in the Jim Crow South. o wit, there were many positive events and memorable instances in the campaigns that represented the justice that African-Americans were seeking -- and achieved -- by basically doing their jobs to bring justice in the 1950s during the Civil Rights Movement. his paper focuses on the Montgomery…...

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There are several schools of thought when it comes to understanding how the African-American citizens of Montgomery forged a successful social change through their boycott. The main explanation as to how these dramatic changes were brought about, holds that "... the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery Improvement Association"[footnoteRef:5] played the key role. But another interpretation emphasizes the critical role of the Supreme Court's decision striking down the local laws regarding segregation on public transportation (Coleman, et al., 2005). [5: Christopher Coleman, Laurence D. Nee, and Leonard S. Rubinowitz. "Social Movements and Social-Change Litigation: Synergy in the Montgomery Bus Protest." American Bar Foundation. Vol. 30, Issue 4, 2005. ]

But there is a third and fascinating explanation presented by Coleman and colleagues: that is, the boycott and the litigation, put together when people of like mind came together to demand and achieve social change, " ... interacted, each shaping and reinforcing the other" (Coleman, 663).

In conclusion, the power of the people to get something important done, as was seen in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, can never be shut down. The boycott will always be seen by historians and scholars as one huge piece of the puzzle that blacks had to resolve before they could begin to enjoy the Constitutional rights that the founding fathers intended for all to have.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (pp. 8-9)
Evocative here is the constraint of prejudice that denigrates the target into a victim and that exacerbates the surface malice of prejudice by humiliating the victim and having the potential to make him actualize his or her labeling. In a spiral of self-prophecy, the target of prejudice frequently actualizes perceptions of the offender and indeed Du Bois goes on to observe that: "the history of the American Negro is the history of this strife -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self" (p.9)

The last words -- "better and truer self" -- are echoes of the epochal theme that Du Bois…...

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References

Banton, M. (2009) The Idiom of Race in Black, Les & John Solomos, Theories of Race and Racism, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Du Bois, W.E.B. (2007). The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press Holt, T.C. (1990). The political uses of alienation: WEB Du Bois on politics, race, and culture. American Quarterly, 42, 306

Jackson, J., (2005) Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction, Rutgers University Press

Weiten, W. (2007) Psychology: Themes and Variations, USA; Thomson Wadsworth.

EB DuBois
Outline of Critique of .E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

Collective Nature of the ork

Black Spirituals as Thematic Introductions

Black Spirituals as conveyors of historical record

Black Spirituals as oral tradition

Truth Telling

Assassination of Booker T. ashington and others who agree with him

Capitulation to society as it is, rather than the way it should be for blacks

DuBois, is one of the greatest African-American thinkers, oraters and writers of history. His works are often bold assassinations of the development of the Black, former slave class in the U.S., through periods were they repeatedly faced bold and subtle racism but were simultaneously expected to be successful, because laws were, "better than they used to be." DuBois' work The Souls of Black Folk, though constituent of several divergent essays is to many the source and center of nearly all his messages regarding the truth telling that needs to be done, in history to properly place…...

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Works Cited

Denton, Virginia Lantz. Booker T. Washington and the Adult Education Movement. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993.

DuBois, W.E.B. "The Souls of Black Folk" in Sundquist, Eric J., ed. The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Sundquist, Eric J., ed. The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

WEB DuBois
of Our Spiritual Strivings

In the first chapter of the Souls of Black Folk, DuBois presents one of the main arguments of the book. That is, the notion of double-consciousness or veiled consciousness. According to DuBois, "the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, -- a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world." By this, the author means that the white hegemony has pre-defined what "blackness" is, to the point where Black people are "always…measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." He calls for the self-ownership of African-American identity.

Of the Dawn of Freedom

In this second chapter, DuBois presages, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." He traces race relations throughout…...

EB Du Bois
The contrast between the thought of EB Du Bois and that of his predecessor Booker T. ashington is readily apparent in the titles of the best-known works by the two men. ashington's thinking is laid out in his book Up From Slavery, and the title indicates not only an autobiography, but one which is unapologetic in the credence it lends to the typical American capitalist narrative of "rising" in the world. By contrast EB Du Bois offers his trenchant critique of ashington in a work entitled The Souls of Black Folk: the very title indicates that we are meant to be closely considering not materialistic but spiritual values in wondering how the African-American population would make their way in the United States after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment and into Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the rest. It is worth considering closely, though, how Du Bois offers an…...

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Works Cited

Du Bois, WEB. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. New York: Bantam Classic, 1989. Print.

However, many people believe DuBois wrote his work in direct opposition to Washington's "acceptance" of certain white impositions on blacks, like not being able to vote, or not working for a liberal arts education, but gaining a trade instead. DuBois' main arguments then are that blacks should not "settle" for anything, but fight for equal rights in all areas. In the "Forethought" to the book he writes, "Leaving, then, the white world, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses -- the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls" (DuBois 209). This shows he is writing for a black audience, and he is going to give them clues and questions about their identity, their culture, and their equality, and he wants them to use them to better themselves and stop settling…...

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References

DuBois, W.E.B., and Washington, Booker T. Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books, 1999.

Songs of Sorrow
"The Sorrow Songs" is a message that is related to the spirituality of the African-American people. In summary, Dubois gives what he perceives as a message of the African-American people, which is that of hope, not only in that particular time period, but also subsequent generations. Without doubt, African-Americans have made a substantial contribution as to what the United States is as a nation. This, in particular, does not take into account the work that the African-American partook and accomplished for the economy of the United States while being slaves, or the influences of African-American playwrights and originators as significant as all that was. Instead, this takes into account the manner in which the African-Americans' struggle for freedom and liberties instigated by the United States to extensively analyze its morals and epitomes. More so, this caused the United States to question itself, whether it actually was the land…...

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References

Craven. J. (2014). Please don't tell me all lives matter. Huffington Post. Retrieved 30 November 2015 from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-craven/please-stop-telling-me-th_b_6223072.html 

Du Bois. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk; Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903.

Gooding-Williams, R. (2009). In the Shadow of Du Bois. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Massey, J., Tenhoor, M., Korsh, S. (2015). Introduction: Black Lives Matter. Aggregate Organization. Retrieved 30 November 2015 from:  http://we-aggregate.org/piece/black-lives-matter

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) wrote his 1913 poem "e ear the Mask" in open defiance of the commonly accepted fallacy of his day that African-Americans were happy in the subservient roles they were forced to assume in the face of white racism. Dunbar, through the use of irony, through inverting the positive connotations of smiling, and through the religious rhetorical tropes of exclamation and crying out to God, conveys the cognitive dissonance between the false face African-Americans were forced to portray to earn a living in white society.
The title of Dunbar's and first lines of the poem may at first suggest a mask that an actor or a performer wears. "e wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our checks and shades our eyes." (Lines 1-2) However, the next lines of the poem suggest that the nature of the mask that is worn is far more…...

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Works Cited

DuBois, W.E.B. "Of the Sons of Master and Man" from The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Classics, 1989.

Dunbar, Paul. "We Wear the Mask." 1913.

King, Martin Luther. Why We Can't Wait. New York: Penguin Books, 1963.

Harlem Renaissance. Web Site accessed July 11, 2002. http://csis.pace.edu/amlit/proj3d/harren.html

Here are a few options for essay books based on the description you provided:

1. "The Souls of Black Folk" by W.E.B. Du Bois - This book is a classic work of historical essays that addresses race relations in the United States during the early 20th century.

2. "The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies - How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths" by Michael Shermer - This book is research-based and examines the psychology behind belief systems and how they shape our views of the world.

3. "The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue" by....

Here are some essay books to consider based on different themes:

1. "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates - a persuasive essay arguing for reparations for African Americans for centuries of slavery and discrimination.

2. "The Souls of Black Folk" by W.E.B. Du Bois - a historical essay collection exploring the experiences of African Americans in the United States post-Civil War.

3. "Bad Feminist" by Roxane Gay - a collection of essays that are both personal and critical, exploring the complexities of modern feminism.

4. "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by Rebecca Skloot - a research-based essay exploring the ethical implications of....